Times Insider|For a Climate and Food Reporter in Alaska, a New Unease in the Air

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For a Climate and Food Reporter in Alaska, a New Unease in the Air

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Salmon-themed public art at Ship Creek in Anchorage, Alaska.CreditCreditBrian Adams for The New York Times

By Julia O’Malley

Aug. 22, 2018

My grandparents came to Anchorage after the war. My parents grew up here and so did I. I never trick-or-treated without a snowsuit on. Now my kids, dressed as superheroes, run door to door on dry pavement. Rain keeps showing up in the wintertime. Snow, real snow, has begun to feel precious. My youngest son was 3 before we had enough at once to make a decent snow angel.

Since I started writing about climate and wild food in Alaska four years ago, I must have collected 100 anecdotes about things that might be related to climate change. Small things. Practical inconveniences, mostly, and strange observations.

There’s the whale meat stored in ice cellars, old-school refrigeration units cut into the Arctic permafrost generations ago, that tastes off now because the temperature has edged up.

There are the people in rural villages, used to traveling by snowmobile on rivers while hunting in winter, who have fallen through the ice. I heard a story from a cabdriver in Fairbanks who lost an uncle that way. He was taking a route that his grandparents used to travel by dog sled. But now the ice won’t hold.

In one village on the Arctic coast, a woman showed me a shaman grave mound that seemed to be opening by itself. She told me people kept covering it so as not to let out the bad luck. I suspected the earth underneath had gone soft because the permafrost was melting. In a way, either explanation was the same: a bad omen in the shape of new cracks in the soil.

There are the off-kilter caribou migrations, the river fish spawning at the wrong time, the once predictable tides of ice that carry bearded seal to Alaska Native hunters that never appeared. More than once in the last few years, very old people in Arctic villages have told me that the sky has changed, that the stars are in a different place. What do you do with that?

I’m a freelancer, so I get messages from editors sometimes, asking for stories about “climate refugees” or starving polar bears that they read about somewhere else. What I see, by and large, isn’t so dramatic. Climate change is often a factor, not a direct cause. The shape of the narrative, though, is always the same: sad or mysterious. You can write only so many stories like that. And it’s hard to know if anyone cares. What would they do if they did?

Sometimes the stray accounts I hear do germinate into articles, like my story this week on the dwindling catch in the Copper River, 250 miles east of Anchorage, where for the first time in memory many of the salmon didn’t return from the sea.

Early this summer, my cousin’s husband and my uncle went to the Copper for red salmon. My uncle has been getting our fish there since 1969. But this year nobody got any. Soon biologists closed the river to fishing so enough red salmon could make it upriver to spawn.

Around that time I was texting with my editor, Sam Sifton. No fish this year, I wrote, it’s spooky. He suggested I write something. But here’s the thing: There’s no way to explain what those fish mean in a news story.

To get it, you’d have to feel what it’s like walking my children to school in January under moonlight, cold biting into my jeans. You’d have to wake up every morning in the dark for 60 days and look for the sun coming up over the mountains until one day it does. And then you might understand the rush that comes when the birch leaves peek out. Next come the fish.

That first red filet off the grill tastes like clay minerals and salt and everything you’ve been waiting for.

And even that doesn’t capture it. There are whole Alaska Native communities, far off the road system, where people have been watching fish return from the ocean to the same rivers for hundreds of years. There, in the act of catching, cutting and smoking fish, elders might explain to young people the ornate patterns of the local weather, animals and geography. Words are spoken in languages that will probably disappear in a generation.

Alaska Native cultures have survived starvation, plagues of disease, colonization, assimilationist boarding schools and poverty, among many other challenges. Now they must adapt to the way climate change is turning the predictable cycles of hunting and fishing inside out.

As I was reporting my story, I called a government office and talked to an official who monitors Alaska Native hunting and fishing. It turned out that he was from a small mostly Aleut village called Chignik, home to about 100 people in southwest Alaska, where the cash economy is built on commercial fishing. The locals also have to fish for themselves to offset the high cost of groceries over the winter. This year is a disaster. The fish just didn’t show up.

Alaska Natives are survivors, he told me. If they couldn’t innovate, they wouldn’t still be here. Still, people were shaken, he said.

“We’d have to make an adjustment, a huge adjustment, to survive on something else,” he said. “I feel for those folks.”

And about then his voice broke, and I realized he was weeping.

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A version of this article appears in print on , Section A, Page 2 of the New York edition with the headline: Now Are the Summers of Discontent. Order Reprints | Today’s Paper | Subscribe